<em>Gentefied: </em>The Netflix Show That Makes Gentrification Personal

First conceptualized as a web series, Gentefied takes its name and core theme from a term that was birthed in the same neighborhood where the show is set. In 2007, a year after opening Eastside Luv Wine Bar in East Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, the Mexican American proprietor Guillermo Uribe coined the term gentefication, a portmanteau of gente, the Spanish word meaning “people,” and, of course, gentrification. Speaking with Los Angeles Magazine seven years later, Uribe, whose bar still sits adjacent to Mariachi Plaza, said the concept emerged when he “started to see the potential of improving the community from the inside out. If gentrification is happening, it might as well be from people who care about the existing culture.”

Boyle Heights has indeed been experiencing rapid gentrification, which some attribute to the influx of upwardly mobile Latinx artists and professionals, including some who grew up there. On Gentefied, Chris is the most obvious avatar of this demographic. Having graduated from college in Idaho, he’s returned to the neighborhood with grandiose culinary ambitions for himself. That dream, and his work as a line cook at a high-end restaurant, shapes Chris’s belief that catering to a wider range of tastes could weaken the threat that gentrification poses to his grandfather’s taco shop, Mama Fina’s.

Like Chris, his cousins Ana (Karrie Martin) and Erik (Joseph Julian Soria) don’t want to let a development-hungry landlord evict their Pop (Joaquín Cosio). But while Chris believes that the solution to Pop’s troubles is a trendier menu that will attract new customers, Ana and Erik fear that kind of shift would rob the shop of its soul. More important, they worry that a revamped Mama Fina’s would endear Boyle Heights to outsiders whose arrival would further displace longtime residents. Gentefied homes in on this conflict among the cousins, as well as the rifts that emerge between them and other members of the community. Though the inevitable changes to Mama Fina’s don’t arrive until Episode 7, deflating some of the show’s narrative tension, the cousins’ different outlooks capture the conundrum of gentefication. (In portraying how that process affects Boyle Heights, the Netflix show joins the riveting Starz drama Vida.)

Read: “Vida” mines the highs and lows of coming home

To be sure, many of Gentefied’s obvious culprits of gentrification are white, and the show sometimes slips into caricature to make a point about outsiders’ arrogance. (In one scene, for example, a white male landlord yells at a Mexican store owner because she dislikes the mural he commissioned: “This is my building, and I’m making it better for you!”) But the production devotes more attention and care to the moments when Latinx characters challenge one another about the stakes of their neighborhood’s changes and their own roles in them. In one such scene, Ana’s girlfriend, Yessika (Julissa Calderon), confronts Chris with a bright-yellow flyer advertising a food tour clumsily titled “Bite Into Boyle Heights.” The event, organized by LA Weekly (perhaps a nod to the once-venerable publication’s recent gutting), targets customers outside the Eastside enclave. Yessika excoriates Chris for having added Mama Fina’s to the list of local restaurants for (primarily white) participants to discover. “Welcoming outsiders en masse with open arms like this is pushing people out of their homes and into the tents around every corner,” she says, later asking if he thinks that his “only option is selling out [his] community.”

These aren’t subtle lines, but Gentefied seeks to convey the sense of betrayal that can accompany decisions like Chris’s; for Yessika, it’s a personal affront. Perhaps fittingly, Chris also serves as a symbol for the Gentefied creators themselves, the Mexican and Guatemalan American director Marvin Lemus and his Mexican American co-writer, Linda Yvette Chávez. As the America Ferrera–produced show nears its premiere date, some local residents belonging to the activist group Defend Boyle Heights have voiced their displeasure with the attention the show has attracted to their neighborhood. “Gentefied is clearly trying to latch onto the popularity the anti-gentrification struggle has countrywide,” one recent post on the group’s Facebook page reads. “Gentefied is not showing solidarity with the repression activists face, but romanticizing these protests and stripping them of what actually gives them power.”